


Hands

by salanaland



Series: Kenway family feels [1]
Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Angst, Creepy kid Haytham, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-23
Updated: 2013-11-23
Packaged: 2018-01-02 11:12:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1056089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salanaland/pseuds/salanaland
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tessa has a hard time coping after her husband's death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hands

She kept seeing his hand.

Every time he approached her, face brim-full with doubt and loneliness, she only saw that gruesome hand.

It could be scrubbed forever and she would see only the dried blood in every crease, the tiny dimpled knuckles she had counted innumerable times now drenched in murder. The white crescents of his fingernails blackened with the life of a man. Another man, that is, because now and irrevocably and horribly, her little boy had grown up.

His piping voice terrified her. When he knocked on her door (dear God, his wicked hand, his killing hand) she wanted only to run and hide, a little girl cowering beneath her quilts, heart pounding, waiting for the creaking or the shouting or the dying to stop. After he left, after she saw him covertly wipe away a tear (good Lord, his evil little hand), she could do naught but cry and vomit.

Somehow, her husband had made his life before her seem like such an adventure. Sailing the high seas, finding treasure chests at the drop of a hat, saving a pretty lady from prison. She wasn't even jealous of the women in his past, as long as they stayed there. (At least she wouldn't have to worry about any more letters from that Anne Burly or whatever her name was from Carolina.) Even when he explained to her about being an Assassin, it mostly sounded like a cross between a strange church and a top secret gentleman's club, with not so much actual, well, assassination. Sure, people had died, wicked people, but she thought it as remote as when her father's bank had to take back people's houses and put them on the street. Yes, sometimes they died. But his hands were clean of their deaths.

But her husband's hands were not. (Oh, Edward's strong hands his loving hands his hands that caressed his hands so firm his hands that promised his hands inside his hands so cold his hands taking lives his hands bloody)

It was the only explanation. Tessa wasn't a killer. Their son had to have inherited it from somewhere, had to have been born with it. It was only a matter of time before he took somebody's life with his own (awful) hands.

She hadn't seen it in his hands in his calluses in his ocean eyes in his daughter in his son hadn't seen it until that night bloody night his eyes open seeing nothing never again never see their son never know their monster she would never see him again. And with Edward forevermore beneath the stone she would never live again and if she saw him in the boy's face he would stab her in the heart right through the eye and the gushing blood would flow over his vile hand over his evil hand over his live hand better they both had died that night, she happy and he her little boy, better to have been murdered right than live so wrong.


End file.
